The Ferris Wheel

As much as I fear heights and roller coasters , I always found Ferris Wheels interesting. Obviously I’m not alone in this excitement. Who doesn’t find carnival rides exciting? The lights, the sounds, the motion. When it comes to game development, there’s always something that sparks the question of: ”How would this be recreated in the digital form?”

One of the challenges I discovered was that there were only so many ways that you can make a Ferris wheel, but there was only one true way to truly make it happen. I broke this problem down into different sections. modeling, shading, animation, and scripting.

Now, you can use whatever modeling software you want, and the same goes for the game engine. For this I chose Blender and Unreal Engine.

OPTIONS

Static model
- Pros: Simple model for static shots
- Cons: Doesn’t leave a lot to work with when it comes to scripting animation
Skeletal mesh approach with an armature to rotate the bone for the wheel
- Pros: Simple with less pieces
- Cons: Not very versatile if you want to destroy the ferris wheel for whatever reason
Modular approach with swappable spokes, passenger cabins, and an optional center hub
- Pros: Parts are swappable, to give designers the ability to prototype different looks
- Cons: Requires modeling of more pieces, and initial set up

The goal is to make the ferris wheel as modular as possible, so we’ll go with the modular approach.

NOTE: I will only be covering the parameterization of the spokes and the cabins. These will be created as statics.

PARTS LIST

The parts of the ferris wheel that we’ll need will include:

A Spoke
Perimeter frame
Support beams
Center Hub
Passenger cabin

MODELING

Since I’m using Unreal Engine which works in centimeters, I will set the unit scale in Blender to 0.01

And I chose to use a reference for my measurements with Imperial/feet.

Export all of your pieces to Unreal Engine and make sure that you have your geometry set the faces.

UV CHOICES

SHADING

This is where we get to see the fun when it comes to the UV layout.

NOTE: You may want to go back later and get a little more creative once you see how we’re using the layout.

First, we’re going to create the material for the light bulbs. As you can see, we’re creating the bands with a nice little node that Epic provides. Add a few scalar constants (can be made into parameters later if you’d like), and a time node to drive the scrolling effect. Then we create a couple of Vector3’s for our band colors, then we ultimately connect them all together. We also created a Vector2 to play as a XY coordinate adjuster.

Create a material instance of the material we just created and apply it to the material slot for the light bulbs on the static mesh of the spoke.

ANIMATION

Now we need to setup the blueprint to make the ferris wheel rotate.

IMPROVEMENTS

This is a basic example to cover some of the thought that went into the ferris wheel. Now we could have simply model the entire ferris wheel as one object, but this workflow provides a tool that can be utilized for multiple applications ( like a windmill for instance). An improvement that we could add is for the frame around the perimeter of the ferris wheel. We can make this adjustable and modular as well., I will more than likely go back and revise the ferris wheel with that ability To give level artists more freedom when laying out their scenes.